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FreeBSD an officially supported GNOME platform
GlockaDe writes: "FreeBSD is now a supported platform for the GNOME project. This means that now, new GNOME releases will not ship unless they successfully build and run on FreeBSD. The actual note is buried in these minutes."
Wow, you'd better tell all those FreeBSD users running vmware that. They're probabally going to be annoyed that they have to stop using vmware simply because you aren't allowed to port kernel modules?
/proc for everything? It's kind of like old DOS programming in that it's almost completely tied to the OS (and is not actually a standard, so it can change at any time) and platform. I can see using /proc occasionally when you don't have any other options, but it seems like some Linux programmers (not Unix programmers) like to use it in every damn program. It's really annoying for those of us who port applications.
I'll give you half credit though, vmware had problems in prior to 4-STABLE as of the beginning of the year, and won't run at all on anything prior to 4-STABLE.
Rant mode: On
By the way, what is the deal with everybody in Linux using
Rant mode: Off
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I read the internet for the articles.
GNOME is supposed to be a Unix desktop, not just a Linux desktop, so portability across Unices would be a goal anyway. I doubt that KDE had much to do with it.
Yes, it will; this FreeBSDzine article discusses it. (Hint: just because it requires help from the kernel, that doesn't mean FreeBSD's kernel can't provide that help, even if the kernel modules in question had to be written by somebody other than the people at VMware.)
No, that's not good enough - Wine runs native on FreeBSD.
You want to run Linux VMware on the FreeBSD running on VirtualPC, and then run NT on VMware.
Then you can run Hercules on NT (yes, it runs on Linux as well, so you could run Linux on VMware instead)...
...and boot the S/390 version of Linux on that.
No, wait, you do want to run Linux on VMware. Then you'd run the NT version of Hercules under Wine....
GNOME has run on BSD for quite some time; that's not the point. The point is that now it's part of the GNOME project's list of reference platforms. I avoid the use of the word "support" since there's no support in the traditional sense of the word from the GNOME project itself, but BSD is a compatible platform and officially considered in the release plans.
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Celebrate the finer things in life
KDE2.1 and the QT threading issues under X4 have been dealt with. Will@FreeBSD.Org committed fixes this past weekend.
Things have been fine under X3, and things were even ok under X4 for the first few days after KDE2.1's release.
I stopped using GNOME since KDE2's first release, so I can't comment on that.
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My comments and opinions completely reflect those of anyone and anything I am remotely associated with.
what a co-incidence! Apple recently stated that they wouldn't ship any future version of Aqua until it compiles on Darwin! go BSD! ;)
- j
Since BSD is more of a server operating system
Really? Then can you explain this product?
FreeBSD the desktop version
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
The Linux boom is leveling off and people are realizing that there are other systems like FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD which are all rather nice.
Sure the BSD's do not focus on being desktop workstations but that does not mean the Gnome and KDE developers cannot make it work nicely as one. At times it is hard setting up X under BSD, but once it is running it is pretty sweet.
I use FreeBSD since it seems well rounded with tons of ported applications and many performance enhancements for the x86 platform while the other two main branches are happy producing a great server OS which runs on all kinds of hardware. I am unsure how well X and Gnome runs on those systems. I doubt many NetBSD users would feel bad if someone said XFreeBSD is hard to install onto NetBSD. One place that I know is using NetBSD has it running several large printers. I think they manage them through SNMP.
Pick the right OS for the job. I am glad FreeBSD works well as a server and can do the job as a workstation so long as I do not mind tinkering with it till the sound works.
FreeBSD continues to improve nicely. I cannot wait to see when 5.0 is released sometime in the next year or so. The integration of BSDi features like fine grained SMP will be great, even for a single processor. A nicely threaded kernel will be good for everything. Take that along with more development on KQueues and you will have a fine desktop platform and a database/web server.
Brennan Stehling - http://brennan.offwhite.net/blog/
The above link is more than a month old, and what's noteworthy now is that Nautilus is not supported on FreeBSD. Nautilus is GNOME 1.4. To complicate matters, GNOME 1.4 is way behind schedule, and before this article on Slashdot, I don't think FreeBSD was a priority at all!
In short, this article should strong-arm the GNOME Foundation into delaying GNOME even more, for better or for worse.
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
...I can run BSD in emulation using Virtual PC in Mac Classic mode while using OSX as my main operating system?
[Insert the usual disclaimer here]